


it was all falling down and a long way from cheap

by fragilelittleteacup



Category: The Young Ones (TV 1982)
Genre: Brain Damage, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Dysfunctional Family (Vyvyan's Mother), Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Emotional Sex, Explicit Sexual Content, Friendship, Humor, M/M, Manhandling, Painful Sex, Pining, Smut, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Worry, this fic is discontinued until further notice
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-13
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-16 20:37:03
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12350232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fragilelittleteacup/pseuds/fragilelittleteacup
Summary: Vyvyan had caught his eye. Had looked into him, blue eyes burning a path straight through to his deepest and darkest. Like a hot knife through butter. Like a wire through plasticine.Rick had no fucking defences at all.(Rick/Vyvyan. Fic and chapter titles taken from Gareth Liddiard's song 'Strange Tourist'. Idea for this fic came about when I imagined what The Young Ones characters might be like as real people.)





	1. couldn't shake the illness or endure the cure

They lived in bummed out city.

It was the end of the world, a shit-filled petri dish of emotionally-stunted bohemians, the walls covered in bacteria and dust. On their off days they went to university. Mike was convinced he worked for the fucking secret service or something, and wore suits _all the fucking time,_ as if pinstripes could distract from the fact he was the most pompous motherfucker to ever grace the earth’s surface. Neil was half corpse and half boy, sluggish voice booming out from the depths of his anorexic chest, ribs shifting beneath his skin like broken piano keys. Rick _thought_ he was an anarchist, when really all he did was surround himself with egotistical intellectuals who read too many books and needed a cold hard dose of  _shut the fuck up._

But Vyvyan was the really weird one.

Sometimes Rick would wake of an afternoon, staggering over to the bathroom with a hangover the size of a planet _,_ and Vyvyan would already be awake. He would be standing in front of the mirror, not yet decked out in his denim and leather and silver studs, wearing nothing but a white singlet and some undies. He always looked _softer_ with that much skin exposed, even despite his piercings and his peroxide-tinged orange hair. Without the gel and the punk outfit, he was just some _guy,_ which made Rick…

…uncomfortable.

“Vyvyan! What are you doing! Get out! It’s my turn in the bathroom!”

Vyvyan would turn and look at him, eyelids dipped down low, hips canted forward in a lazy slouch. He was rawboned. Stretched thin. Like any moment he might just dissolve into a puddle of drugs and sweat, more lucid in these quiet moments than Rick had been in his whole fucking life. There was knowledge in Vyvyan’s blue eyes; a history that he’d never disclosed. A personality that had slipped from his fingers, transformed into something else until he was unrecognisable, mutated beyond recognition into a monosyllabic outcast with no real morals at all.

Rick would grab him by the shoulder, shove him out into the hallway just so he could dig his fingers into the meat of Vyvyan’s shoulders. Vyvyan always went willingly, in those moments. And he always laughed.

Like he knew something Rick didn’t.

 

 

The rest of the time, he was a fucking psychopath.

Rick could barely keep up with him. Vyvyan would be sitting still one moment, twitching like he was being zapped with electricity, and then he’d be _exploding._ Smashing down walls, breaking windows, throwing plates, hurling glass at the floor– his brain was fried, warped by every substance that existed. Cannabinoids, opioids, stimulants, disassociative hallucinogens– fuck, there was nothing that Vyvyan hadn’t snorted, injected, smoked, or swallowed at some stage in his life. Sometimes he would be so senseless with violence that there was no talking him down. Rick would just have to cling to him, pinning him against the floor, using the weight of his body to trap him in place.

He’d swear and bite and yell, demanding the return of peace and quiet in their shared living space, gripping Vyvyan’s wrists hard enough to leave bruises. Marks that would linger for days, marks that would turn from black to blue to green to yellow; the kaleidoscope of their violence. He wondered whether Vyvyan would touch those marks tentatively in the quieter moments. He wondered what Vyvyan thought of them. There was nothing more intimate than leaving bruises on somebody else, necessary as their fights were. Vyvyan needed  _somebody_ to reign him in, after all.

“Calm down,” Rick would hiss, “calm the _fuck_ down Vyvyan, you fucking _nutcase-”_

Vyvyan would gasp and snarl against his cheek, shudders punching through him from head to toe. The spikes of his belt would dig into Rick’s hips, and it never quite hurt as much as it should have.

Vyvyan would say things. Whisper words Rick didn’t understand.

“Benzoylmethylecgonine,” he would say, manic laughter shaking his voice apart, “methamphetamine, diacetylmorphine, morphine-”

“Shut up. Shut up, shut up, shut _up_ -”

Vyvyan would keep laughing. He would laugh so hard that, eventually, he’d no longer be laughing, just making horrific _noises_ that didn’t translate to anything that any other human being could understand. But he would always fall limp. He would disintegrate, separating from his body, consciousness fading from his eyes. Rick’s bones would be straining beneath his skin like metal wires, rubbing uncomfortably from how hard he'd been holding on, until he went limp too.

He would sit up, scrambling off Vyvyan’s lifeless body before anybody could see them. The first few times he’d fearfully watched his friend, terrified by the emptiness before him. But he’d learned, quite quickly, that Vyvyan always bounced back– louder, crazier, and even more mouthy than before. 

But those moments. Those quiet moments, when the stillness was the only thing between them... those snatches of time terrified and intoxicated Rick in a way nothing else ever had.

 

 


	2. went psychotic in the navy and he wouldn't mend

Rick’s pen moved rapidly over pages in his notebook, the mania of spoken words reflected in the messiness of his writing. He was hunched over at the kitchen bench, eyes freakishly wide as he stared downward, clenching his pen so tight it almost looked painful. As usual, he was dressed in a dirty, dust-covered suit, badges displayed proudly on his lapel. _DOWN WITH FASCISTS,_ proclaimed one such pin, accompanied by the universal emblem of a raised fist. The symbol of his generation. A symbol that he, in actuality, did not understand at all. That tended to happen when one’s idea of a revolution was an isolated feat.

Vyvyan strolled into the kitchen, the action of his steps jutting out in front of him like the drunken approximation of a swagger. In addition to his fly being undone and his shirt being unevenly buttoned, his Doc Martens were haphazardly done up with an unnecessary number of knots. His usual snarl, mouth pouted up beneath his septum piercing, was well and truly in place this morning. His face was whiter than usual, taking on the colour and consistency of chalk beneath feverish sweat, and one look at his unfocussed eyes confirmed that he was still seeing double from the night before.

He was hungover.

Which meant, naturally, that he greeted Rick by walking up to him and smacking him over the head.

“Ow! Vyvyan! Can’t you see I’m trying to write!”

Vyvyan grinned, the sharper point of one canine showing as his lips pulled up into the lazy expression. “Sure I can. Just don’t care.”

“I won’t let you distract me, you know,” Rick cried petulantly, batting his housemate away, “The people’s poet doesn’t stop just because some _pleb_ is incapable of comprehending his message!”

Vyvyan continued to hit him because, well, the entertainment of seeing Rick’s scrawny body flailing about was almost good enough to compensate for his headache. He kept it up until Mike wandered into the kitchen, hands buried in his dressing gown pockets, and told him to quit it. They then all sat in silence, waiting for Neil to appear and make breakfast.

“You look like hell, Vyv,” Mike told him pointedly, “you been eatin’?”

Vyvyan shot him a bitter smile. “Maybe I’d be eating more if Niel would _come and make us some damn breakfast!”_

His yelled demand was answered by a miserable holler from upstairs, and Vyvyan angrily crossed his arms in anticipation of some warm lentil meal, fingers itching for a weapon should their live-in maid take too long to get his arse in gear. Mike was still watching him, eyes narrowed behind dark sunglasses.

“Oi,” Mike said, elbowing Rick, “look at ‘im, would you?”

Rick did, plainly irritated. “What?”

“Looks like hell. Don’t he?”

Rick squinted across the table at Vyvyan, getting an answering glare for his trouble. Thick as he was, Rick wasn’t a total idiot– he could see the gaunt dips in Vyvyan’s cheeks, the slim shape that his face had taken on lately. It always seemed to be _him_ that witnessed Vyvyan in states of psychosis and catatonia, so the fact that Mike was only just catching on made him slightly worried. He didn’t want to bring the issue out into the spotlight. Didn’t want to _discuss_ it. Vyvyan watched him steadily across the table, and Rick shifted nervously in his seat. He honestly could not tell what Vyvyan wanted him to say, or whether Vyvyan was even _aware_ how unstable he was. Brain damage did terrible things to normal people, and he wasn’t sure whether Vyvyan could ever have qualified as being anything other than _doomed._ Normalcy wasn’t a destiny that had ever awaited any of them.

“What are you talking about,” he scoffed, waving a hand casually, “he’s fine.”

Vyvyan nodded in agreement, smiling widely, and Rick sighed with no small amount of relief. He was walking a tightrope, never quite sure what rules applied to the secrets he knew. He remembered holding Vyvyan down, begging him to calm down, and became even more uncomfortable where he sat.

Their bodies pressed together.

Vyvyan’s breath against his neck, puffing out in unsteady whimpers.

Wet dreams.

_Desires._

Rick looked away, back at his notebook. His heart beat a furious tempo against the underside of his ribcage, and it wasn’t just heat that propelled his sensory overload– he knew he’d looked down too late, and every heartbeat was echoed by the poisonous burn of anxiety. Vyvyan had caught his eye. Had looked into him, blue eyes burning a path straight through to his deepest and darkest. Like a hot knife through butter. Like a wire through plasticine.

Rick had no fucking defences at all.

Neil thudded down the stairs and entered the kitchen, dejected and dour as ever. Rick had never been so thankful to see the hippie motherfucker in his life.

 

 


	3. went down there like a fool in love

Vyvyan’s room really freaked Rick out.

The whole place was a fucking mess, which was more expected than it was a shock, and it would’ve been hypocritical for Rick to judge him on that front– no, it was the _contents_ of that mess that truly fucked with Rick’s mind. Vyvyan had shit lying around that no bastard should treat so casually. Knives. Coffee mugs full of cigarette butts. Stolen street signs. Women’s underwear, leftover from the hook-ups he still somehow managed to score. Traffic cones. Needles. A whole _range_ of crap, piled up so that the floor was obscured at every inch. Good fucking thing too. Rick had seen the floor once, and that carpet was so fucking saturated with the discharge of Vyvyan’s lifestyle that one could probably take the top layer of it off with a spoon. Rick liked to talk about _culture,_ and Vyvyan loved retorting by saying, ‘there’s no culture could match up to the plates in my bedroom’, and shit, he was right. The green mould and black slime reclaiming one corner of his room, stemming from the crockery and utensils he vaguely flung in that direction whenever he finished eating, certainly were not forces to be casually trifled with.

Everything smelled like cigarettes, stale beer, and old food. Springs were bursting through the skin of Vyvyan’s bed, and Rick would genuinely wonder how he managed to sleep there if he didn’t know Vyvyan’s drug-addled psychosis as well as he did. The mirror on the wall was cracked, sliced clean through, the jagged lines leading to a central smash point that looked deliberate. Kind of made Rick wonder what Vyvyan saw in his reflection. Whether he was able to reach moments of clarity when looking into his own eyes, or whether he saw nothing there at all.

Most disturbing of all were the three photographs.

They were family portraits– or, more honestly, dismal fucking excuses for family portraits. A window into a broken home. They were displayed wonkily on Vyvyan’s bedside table, beside a wilted Begonia in a cracked pot, and looked like they had once been destroyed in a fit of drunken rage, and then lovingly restored the next day in an act of sober self-loathing. Vyvyan, couldn’t have been more than five or six, stared out from behind shattered glass with a wide, beaming grin, cheeks round and eyes full of a boy’s optimism. His mother beside him was smiling too, but the fissures were already beginning to show in her expression. Her face, tired and gaunt, told a story that Rick ached to know, almost as much as he wanted to meet the boy in those photographs. He wanted to know where that boy had gone.

He wanted to know what had happened to that boy.

He stood in Vyvyan’s doorway, fair on his way to being drunk after having consumed five ciders. He’d never handled his alcohol very well, and he hadn’t eaten dinner yet.

Vyvyan was out somewhere, probably shacking up with a bird and getting a load off, and Rick felt like shit. Well, he didn’t quite know what he felt. The chaos of this damn house, of this fucking bedroom, and of _Vyvyan Basterd himself_ was suffocating. There were too many details demanding to catch his eye, drawing his attention a billion different ways; so many stories that he’d never know, buried in the debris of Vyvyan’s life. That guy. That fucking _guy,_ Rick thought, swaying where he stood. Reality seemed to be disintegrating around him, his vision blurring and then focussing, desperately trying to cling to what was tangible. _Life will go on,_ he told himself, but the thought was far from comforting. In fact, it did little more than make him panic further, because he knew this would never cease.

This obsession.

These feelings.

This _caring_ bullshit.

He wanted Vyvyan. He wanted to fix what, undoubtedly, could not be fixed. Which had him good and fucked, because there was no repairing someone so damaged. Just like those family photos. They’d forever be marred by violence.

“You arse,” he whispered, not sure who he was talking to. The moment the words left his mouth he was yanked back into reality, teetering unsteadily on the balls of his feet.

He slammed Vyvyan’s door closed hard enough to break the knob.

That felt a little more _status quo._

 

 


End file.
